Roasted Vegetable Soup for No Croutons Required.

At the beginning of the month I received an email kindly asking me to take part in a new food event in the blogosphere, No Croutons Required, created and hosted by Lisa's Kitchen and Tinned Tomatos.


The theme for February is simply Vegetarian Soups.

I thought and thought about what to make. Should I make one of my standby veggie soups, or maybe put the vegetarian spin on a non-veggie soup in my repertoire? None of the above, as I decided it was the perfect time to pull out an as-yet-unused cookbook that my lovely Mary sent me after Scott and I moved to Kamloops last year. That sneaky girl tricked me into telling her which cookbook I was currently lusting after, and then sent me a copy of it - Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson. It's become one of my most read cookbooks, and I visit Heidi's website, 101 Cookbooks, weekly. If you haven't checked it out (there might be 3 or 4 of you out there who haven't), you should. It's lovely.

I had marked her Roasted Vegetable Soup to try the first time I opened the book. Tomatos, red peppers, onions (I used red) and garlic are drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and then roasted in the oven until everything is tender and beginning to brown. Then the veggies are whizzed to a puree with vegetable broth and smoked paprika, and you are ready to eat.


What a great soup, and roasting winter tomatos pulls out the teeny bit of flavor they have. The smoked paprika is brilliant and really makes the soup what it is. I only had two problems - one, my garlic cloves were a little on the small side, and because I wasn't watching them closely, most of them burned and I wasn't able to use them in the soup. I can only imagine how much better the soup would have been with that extra roasted garlic. And my second problem - we ate the whole batch of soup in two days. What a delicious problem to have!